Muzzling the Whistleblower

The Department of Justice Moves to Punish the Doctor Who Exposed a Hospital's Coverup of its transgender medical procedures

Last May, an anonymous whistleblower sent redacted patient records to journalist Christopher Rufo. Relying on those documents, Rufo published an article demonstrating that the Texas Children’s Hospital pediatric gender clinic was continuing to dispense puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to children as young as 11, notwithstanding the hospital’s March 2022 commitment to stop all medical gender procedures for minors. That story prompted an investigation from the Texas Attorney General.

In the documents provided to Rufo, all identifying patient information had been redacted.

What was not known after the story ran in 2023 was that the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division jumped into action and opened an investigation. No, not into whether there was criminal conduct at Texas Children’s Hospital (a new whistleblower has put a spotlight on possible fraud in the way the hospital billed gender procedures for minors). Instead, the DOJ had decided to discover the identity of the whistleblower who had outed the hospital.

At 7:00AM on June 4, three heavily armed federal agents showed up at the home of a self-described “small town general surgeon,” Dr. Eithan Haim. They informed him that he was named in a sealed indictment for four felony counts of having violated HIPPA, the 1996 medical privacy law. This week the indictment was unsealed, and Dr. Haim appeared in Houston Federal Court. He faces 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Any question about whether this prosecution was politically motivated was answered when the indictment became public. It alleges that Haim obtained the patient information, treatment codes, and the identity of the attending physician “without authorization from Texas Children’s Hospital’s electronic records system.” To do that, the indictment contends that Haim had requested to re-activate his login access to pediatric patients not under his care.

That is what might be expected from someone trying to obtain documentary proof of wrongdoing, However, not according to the Department of Justice, which claims that Haim collected the “information under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm” to the hospital.

This is one of the clearest instances in which the power of the government is being brought to punish a whistleblower and send a chilling message to anyone else thinking about exposing dangerous behavior when it comes to children and “gender affirming” medical procedures. The indictment converts the whistleblower into the culprit while casting the hospital as the victim. It turns the facts upside down.

HIPAA has an express exemption for anyone disclosing protected health information if it is made to prevent “a serious and imminent threat to health or safety.”

I put on my lawyer’s hat after I read the DOJ indictment. I wondered if there were other cases similar to the one brought against Dr. Haim. I have not found one. Instead, in the dozens of criminal cases over HIPPA that I reviewed this week, they dealt with accessing patient records to steal identities or social security numbers and then selling them to criminal syndicates, or cases in which there had been grossly negligent data breaches by medical institutions that then refused to cooperate with regulators. There are other instances in which doctors and/or hospitals deliberately refused to encrypt files or sometimes have sold the information to drug companies.

No case of where a whistleblower has been indicted.

Dr. Haim’s criminal defense will be expensive. He has raised about $700,000 from individual online contributions here.

Will the Department of Justice get its way and put Dr. Haim in prison? Strip him of his medical license? The very fact that such questions are the ones in focus — instead of the wrongdoing at Texas Children’s Hospital — is exactly why the Department of Justice brought the case in the first place. It is why three armed federal agents showed up at his home early one morning. This is a troubling escalation of government censorship. Ordinary citizens should be upset. Journalists, especially those of us who depend sometimes on the courage of whistleblowers, should be especially alarmed.